Lamin Fofana - Ballad Air & Fire (2022)

Sierra Leonean artist and producer Lamin Fofana delves into deep, enthralling sonics with the first of new a series, Ballad Air & Fire, which responds to time slowing uncontrollably.

Released today on his own Black Studies label, Ballad Air & Fire is the first installment in an album trilogy, which will be followed by Shafts of Sunlight on July 29th and The Open Boat on August 26th. Sonically, Parts 2 and 3 question the impositions of western rationality in music, and reimagine geographies of African diasporic people respectively.

Part 1 - Ballad Air & Fire:

What happened to us? How did we get here? Where do we go from here? The future is uncertain. The road ahead is constantly changing. What does coming together mean now? Gathering, proximity, making spaces to come together, to sit, listen, and dream in a climate of betrayal and distrust (a climate of fear of contact)? How do you reopen a world that was always shut/tered? Ballad Air & Fire concerns time, the immeasurable and unfathomable. It worries time. It is a disruption of the linearity of historical time, and a gesture towards what historian Robin D.G. Kelley alluded to as blues time - “simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination.” On one hand, it’s about slowness, slowing down long enough and digging deep enough to open up new temporalities, as the structures (of domination/power/tyranny of time, of man) crumbles and breaks down, something else bubbles up with a sense of urgency - I only hope you can hear it. Ballad Air & Fire is the name of a poem by Amiri Baraka. Over the last year, I have been working/conspiring/sabotaging with and against time. With the global pandemic and the world slowing down/shutting down/“lockdown”, I find myself using slowness as a de/re/composition tool, to heighten, to intensify, to deepen certain contradictions in music, in time, in my practice, in an attempt to generate something new, something that gives way to new perceptions. Ballad Air & Fire is a preview, a glimpse into my next project… the first installment in a triptych dealing with an underlying theme of slowness, a history of movement, of unfolding folding human drama/catastrophe, and of creating a space for reflection for voices historically sidelined or marginalized. It’s fractured and fragmented - what’s ahead - but it’s coming up, it’s coming together.